The present invention relates to television measurement of digital video signals, and more particularly to a low duty-cycle transport of a video reference image to a remote location for comparison with a corresponding degraded video image.
Objective measurement of video sequence degradation is done by comparing video frames of an original video sequence that have been transmitted to the corresponding frames of the video sequence that have been received with impairments, as is disclosed in allowed U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/605,241 filed by Bozidar Janko on Feb. 12, 1996, U.S. Pat. No. 5,818,520, entitled "Programmable Instrument for Automatic Measurement of Compressed Video Quality." There is a difficulty when the transmitting and receiving sites are physically separated. When known test sequences are being used, this difficulty is resolved by maintaining an exact copy of the original video sequence to be transmitted at the receiving site. However when comparison of arbitrary sequences is desired, some other means is needed to deliver the frames of the original video sequence at the transmitting end to the receiving end.
What is desired is a method of transmitting selected frames of an original video sequence to a receiving site at full quality so that they may be compared with the corresponding received frames transmitted at normal transmission bit rates to determine degradation.